The 5+2 Layout
Each side of the battlefield is arranged across 7 lanes in two tiers: five Middle Lanes that hold up to 5 creatures across the middle, and two High-Rise lanes that hold 1 creature each. Think of the middle as main street and the High-Rise as the rooftops over it.
Here is the part that surprises players coming from other lane games: combat is open. Any creature can attack any enemy creature — the board is not lane-locked. Lanes exist to set placement limits and to power the High-Rise targeting rules, not to decide who is allowed to fight whom. Positioning in Goblins & Gunslingers is about protection and pressure, not about matching numbers across a table.
High-Rise: The Rooftop Rules
The two High-Rise lanes carry the strictest and most abusable rules on the board. Exactly as the rulebook page states them:
- 1 creature max per lane. You get two rooftop slots, total.
- Fresh High-Rise creatures dodge single-target attacks and effects. Until it attacks, a creature placed in the High-Rise cannot be picked off by enemy attacks or single-target spells.
- Once a High-Rise creature attacks, it can be targeted normally. Taking the shot gives away the hiding spot.
- High-Rise creatures fire at other High-Rise or Middle Lane creatures, including over Cover in the middle. The rooftop ignores the barricades below.
- Board wipes still hit them, and they cannot attack the opponent directly. The rooftop is a sniper nest, never a siege ladder.
That last pair of rules is the balance. A High-Rise creature can never hit the enemy sheriff, so parking your biggest attacker up top takes it out of the face-damage race. And untargetability only shields against single-target trouble — a spell like Dust Storm (2 mana: deal 2 damage to all creatures) scours the rooftops along with everything else. Interestingly, a wipe that names the middle, like Dust Quake (deal 3 damage to all creatures in Middle Lanes), leaves the High-Rise alone by its own text — read every board clear carefully before you count on your perch.
Who belongs on the rooftop?
Creatures whose value comes from existing, not from racing: a body you want alive next turn, a stat-stick the opponent has no clean answer to, or a threat you are saving for a coordinated strike. The card pool leans into it — Overwatch (3 mana) gives a friendly High Rise creature Quickdraw until end of turn, and High Ground Rally (3 mana) hands +1/+1 to creatures in your High Rise lanes. Hold the creature up top while it is untouchable, then attack the turn the strike wins something worth the exposure.
Cover Tokens: The Barricade Rules
Cover Tokens are 0/1 blocking tokens generated by card effects, and they guard exactly one thing: your sheriff. The rules in full:
- While any Cover stands, enemies cannot hit you directly — they must destroy every Cover first.
- Any creature can attack a Cover Token. At 0/1, each token dies to a single hit.
- Your creatures can still be attacked freely. Cover protects the face, not the posse.
- Flying bypasses Cover, and Overshot can spill through it. More on both below.
Cover is tempo made solid. Every token forces an attacker to spend a swing on a 0/1 instead of your life total — and since damage to your sheriff pays your opponent bonus Gold (see the two-resource guide), Cover also cuts off their income. Cards that raise Cover are everywhere: Smoke Screen (2 mana) places a 0/1 Cover Token in each of your Middle Lanes, Frontline Fortification (3 mana) places two, and creatures with Burrow, like the humble 1-mana Prairie Rat, bring their own barricade when summoned to a middle lane.
Flying and Overshot: The Two Ways Through
Flying goes over
Flying: bypasses Cover Tokens entirely. A flyer simply does not care how many barricades stand on main street — it attacks as if the Cover were not there. This is the clean answer to turtling decks: a 1-mana Wingnut Scout or a 4/4 Smog Glider (4 mana and 1 gold) keeps taxing the enemy sheriff while ground troops grind through tokens. When you sit behind Cover yourself, count the enemy flyers before you feel safe.
Overshot goes through
Overshot: excess damage spills over to the next target or the opponent, letting heavy hits break through Cover Tokens. A 5-attack Overshot creature such as Mire Giant (4 mana, 5/4) smashing a 0/1 Cover Token wastes one point on the token and delivers the rest onward. Overshot also punishes chump blocking with creatures — killing a 1-defense blocker with a big hitter sends the leftovers through. Against an Overshot-heavy board, thin walls are paper.
Reading the Whole Board
Open combat means the attacker always has choices, so positioning is really about removing good choices from your opponent:
- Warrant and Barricade bend the targeting rules. A creature with Warrant forces enemy creatures to attack it first; Barricade does the same while shaving 1 damage off incoming hits when possible. A taunt wall plus Cover is a full toll road.
- Middle lane placement still matters to some cards. Effects that read "adjacent" care exactly where a creature stands — the Goblin Scrapheap Sentinel grants Ambush to creatures in adjacent lanes, so its neighbors are chosen, not accidental. And Stampede attackers can shove a surviving defender into another middle lane and make it lose its next attack.
- Lane-wide damage punishes crowding. Blast creatures deal damage to every creature in the attacked lane, so stacking your board into one column invites artillery.
- The rooftop race is real. With only two High-Rise slots per side, deciding which two creatures deserve untargetability — and when to give it up by attacking — is one of the highest-skill calls in the game.
Placement questions come up every single turn, and the answers change with your deck. Aggressive posses like the ones in our Goblin deck guide mostly want bodies on main street hitting faces; control crews from the faction roster live and die by Cover math and rooftop patience. Try both — the free browser beta is the cheapest shooting range on the frontier.